


Five times Maria Stark Jr. sat beside her fathers hospital bed and the one time he sat beside hers

by anna_e



Series: Maria Stark Jr. One Shots [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Dad!Tony, F/M, Father!Tony - Freeform, Mention of Surgery, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Not Cap Friendly, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers (2012), Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, just want y'all to be safe, love comic steve, lowkey anti steve rogers, mention of trauma, movie steve is a piece of shit tho, not team Cap friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 02:28:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17889782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anna_e/pseuds/anna_e
Summary: The five times Maria Stark Jr. sat beside her fathers hospital bed, and the one time he sat beside hers.





	Five times Maria Stark Jr. sat beside her fathers hospital bed and the one time he sat beside hers

**One**

Maria is not stupid and she is not naive, despite what others say. She may be six years old, but she is the daughter of Tony Stark, and her idea of a fun weekend is trying to create tiny robots with her dad. She also knows people, she can read them better than her father ever could, she can tell when people are hurting or afraid or keeping something from her. 

Maria Stark is not an idiot, so she understands what it means when the adults around her whisper. 

“Maria, sweetie, would you like to see your father?” a kind nurse asks. Maria nods and clutches her blue teddy bear tighter as she follows the woman into the room. Her father is laying there, connected to some wires and tubes and looking about as sick as he did a few hours earlier. 

She climbs up onto the bed and sits cross legged, staring at her father as he looks back. His chest is still rising and falling and he doesn’t look that much like a corpse anymore. 

“Tell it to me straight or else I’m gonna make JARVIS sell the coffee maker,” she finally speaks, glaring at her father. 

He answers after a few beats of silence. “Alcohol poisoning.” 

Maria stays silent, her almost deadly gaze unwavering for a few more moments. Tony stares back into those eyes that are so like his own and he wishes, oh how he wishes that she could be taken away from all of this. She doesn’t deserve this, doesn’t deserve to be woken up in the middle of the night and brought to the hospital because her own fucking father couldn’t limit his drinking. He glances away only to look back and see those big brown eyes swimming with tears. 

“C’mere kid,” he holds his arm out and Maria looks like she wants to move, but she just clutches her bear tighter and shakes her head. 

“I don’t wanna hurt you.” 

“C’mon kid, please.” 

Maria chews at her thumbnail before very slowly moving closer to him, sitting down beside him and leaning against his body. Tony forces himself to ignore the slight ache that action sends through his body, his daughter needs him and he will gladly ignore all pain to comfort her. 

A few minutes later and the kid is out cold, one hand tightly holding the front of his hospital gown and the other clutching her bear. 

Tony is shocked and amazed when his custody rights aren’t taken away, Maria will still live with him. He isn’t shocked though when he walks into the kitchen to see Maria dumping out every single liquor bottle into the sink. She hears him and turns to make deadly eye contact while she continues to pour his thousand dollar whiskey down the drain. He can’t find it in himself to be mad.

 

**Two**

“He’s alive, he’s alive and we’ve found him”

Those words cause Maria to break down sobbing. She clutches onto Pepper and they both cry until Happy arrives to take them to the hospital, even then they cry in the car. Maria keeps pinching her arm to assure herself that this isn’t another cruel dream, this is real and she will see her father in just a few hours. 

The skin on her arm is red and raw by the time they’re checked into the hospital as guests and led to the room her father is in. Both Maria and Pepper pause outside the door, Pepper steps forward and presses a kiss to Marias forehead before gesturing for her to go inside. Her legs shake as she walks, but she's always been good at hiding her fears and worries, so she tries to ignore it. 

“Maria?”

Three months, three months since she heard her father speak. Just her name was enough to cause a new wave of fresh tears to start falling. Okay maybe she wasn’t as perfect at masking her emotions as she thought she was.

“Dad,” she finally chokes out, rushing forward and falling to her knees beside the bed, her hand gripping his like he’s her final lifeline. “Papa, dad- thank god you’re alive,” she sobs, her face buried in the mattress as she shakes and holds his hand much harder than she should. 

“Maria, kid, c’mere.” Tony weakly attempts to pull her up, but she moves anyway and stands. Tony pulls at her again so she's sitting on the bed beside him and he wraps his arms tightly around her. Maria doesn’t realize he’s crying until she hears him sniffle, and that starts another brand new wave of tears. 

She focuses on things to bring herself off the edge of a panic attack. Tony is cold, he feels thinner than he was when he left for Afghanistan. That makes sense, they were probably starving and torturing him. She’ll need to be extra gentle with him for a long time, no more jump scares in his lab, she can’t risk being the reason he’s afraid. His chest is still rising and falling, the breath whistles like it does whenever hes sick. He’s covered in scratches and bruises and his eyes are bloodshot. Beating and waterboarding? Most likely, they probably wanted him to create more weapons. 

Something else catches her attention. His chest, something is glowing in his chest, something is different there. She taps it gently, experimentally, and looks at him. 

“My new heart,” is all he answers with. She can deal with that, he’s always skirted around answers, she’ll ask him later when hes in the state to answer questions about it. For now she just wanted to sit by him and probably cry a little bit more. 

Before she falls asleep, she whispers the quietest ‘thank you’ before her eyes shut and she sleeps. 

He returns home after a little over two weeks. It's dark in the house but JARVIS greets him. The first night he’s back, Maria sneaks into his room and falls asleep on his couch, the blue glow and his steady breathing bringing her some semblance of comfort that makes it easier to sleep. 

Life becomes somewhat normal for probably a week, but then Tony throws himself into a project thats something brand new. Maria sits and watches as he makes it so the metal will fit over his body. She doesn’t question him, just lets him work and keeps him company. 

The first time she sees her father fly in his new suit, she laughs and smiles for the first time in months. Deep down though, she worries, this is all going to explode and end badly.

Maria knows people, she knows they won’t just let her father sit back and have fun with his new suit, he will be used. She can only hope that he’ll be strong enough to survive, and that she’ll be strong enough to stand up for him when she needs to. 

 

**Three**

“A wormhole?”

“A wormhole.”

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

“Language, Maria”

“Oh I can guarantee you were doing worse things when you were fifteen, me dropping an f-bomb is probably the least problematic thing I could be doing right now,” she snapped, crossing her arms and glaring at her father. 

The current scene wasn’t exactly new or unusual for the teen, her father laying in a hospital bed with her watching disapprovingly, the thing that landed him in the hospital had been a bit odd though. She was only really mad because the next emotion she was feeling after anger, was terror. And she wasn’t about to let her dad see her break down in tears because of how afraid she’d been. Any kid would be pretty terrified, her father had flown himself into a hole in the sky and just barely made it back out, the fear was understandable. 

“Okay you’re right but that still doesn’t mean I can’t yell at you for swearing!”

“Um yes it does! Thats so hypocritical of you! You were out drinking and partying and-” her words slowed down and soon tears were falling down her face before she knew it. Dammit. She had been trying so hard to keep it all together. He wasn’t even that injured! Right after the fight, he’d gone out with the others and gotten shawarma! He was fine, he was just in the hospital to double check nothing was life alteringly wrong. He was fine. He was going to be fine. He will be fine.

“Maria?” Tony's voice cuts through her almost panicked self assurances. He holds an arm out and Maria doesn’t hesitate to curl up against him, her head resting against his shoulder so she can focus on his breathing. 

He’d tried to call her, but she’d been moved to a safe room before she could grab her phone. She’d watched on the small TV in the corner of the room and stopped breathing until she watched his body fall through the rapidly closing opening. 

None of that mattered though. Right now he was next to her and he wasn’t dead and he was telling her stupid stories to get her mind off the panic and everything would be okay. 

When she returned home, there were five others there already. Bruce, she’d met him. Steve, she’d read about him back when she still did traditional schooling. Natasha, spy who’d lied to her and her father, nice. Clint, dude who tried to murder her while he was under mind control, also nice. Thor, brother of the dude who also tried to murder her, even better. 

Maria was polite to them because being polite was the easiest option. She knew people, she knew at least two of the five would react badly if she greeted them with her usual sarcasm. 

She likes them, Natasha helps her with self defense, Steve was a huge help during one of her history projects, Bruce does yoga with her, Clint is the kind of sarcastic that Maria can easily outmatch or keep up with if she wanted, and Thor is always ready and excited to learn about current pop culture. She likes them and after some time she calls them her family. 

 

**Four**

‘Well,’ Maria thinks as she sits in the waiting room ‘My college visit is definitely cancelled now.’

Her home feels empty without all the Iron Man suits. The expressionless masks that used to make her uncomfortable, now seem more preferable than the empty spaces they left behind. She understands why he did it, but killing Dum-E had pissed her off a little. He may have been a robot, but he was her friend and she had yet to beat him at checkers - somehow. 

“Miss. Stark? You can come see him now,” a nurse spoke up. Maria nodded and grabbed her bag, following the man down the halls and into the room Tony was in. 

The room was dark and part of Maria was saddened to see that the dim blue glow no longer filled whatever dark space Tony ended up in. 

Tony looks up and sees Maria, smiling weakly and patting the edge of the hospital bed. “C’mere kid.”

“You know, I’m getting way too old to keep doing this,” she jokes softly, setting her bag down and moving to sit beside him anyways. She looks at his chest, the bandages covering it, the place the arc reactor isn’t. “How are you feeling?”

“Good, weird. Warm? The reactor was pretty cold.”

“Well I’ll say thats good, better than if you’d said you were in pain.” She pauses before sighing softly. “Talked to the press. Told them no questions would be answered until you made a full recovery, but for now you were fine. The status and action of the Iron Man is currently on hiatus.”

“You talked to the press?”

“Yeah. Nobody else could have done it, nobody else knows how to avoid their questions like you, me, and Pepper. You were out cold and Pepper is still in recovery, I’m next choice. That doesn’t matter though. Heard you made friends with a kid while you were in Tennessee. Already planning on replacing me once I move?” She raises an amused eyebrow and Tony breathes out a laugh before starting to tell her about the little ten year old kid that she’d probably adore. 

He comes home after some recovering in the hospital and things are okay for a bit. Tony invites Harley over and he was right, Maria absolutely adores him. They play video games and eat junk food and she helps him out with some homework because she understands how to “talk like a normal person,  _ dad _ ”. 

She thinks she could get used to this, this simpler life where Tony has time to bake with her and work with her and Harley on stupid inventions that are in no way life changing. She knows this won’t last though. Her father is a man full of fear and she knows something is haunting him. This simple, easy joy won’t last and she knows it. But she also knows that she will stand beside her father through it all. 

 

**Five**

She’s cold, she’s so cold, she’s freezing. Why is she so cold? She moves to grab some blankets, but pain shoots through her body and she freezes. Steve, Bucky, her grandparents, the fall, the cold. Oh god. 

It takes less than a minute for all the memories to come screaming back and soon she’s forcing back tears. Her dad, she needs to see her dad, needs to know he’s okay. 

The nurse isn’t able to stop her and soon she’s in a wheelchair and being brought to the room her father is in. She sees him and wants to cry. Out of relief, rage, or fear, she can’t decide. The nurse leaves the two of them alone and Maria just rests her hand on her fathers as he sleeps. 

She can’t remember much of what happened before she passed out and what happened when they were rescued. She can remember dragging herself, climbing and crawling even though her body was screaming for her to stop. She remembers finally seeing him and laying down beside him, his heart was still beating and that was all she could remember before it went blank. Then she remembers arms, gentle arms around her and lifting her, a blanket around her shivering body and someone saying they were both alive. And then she woke up in the hospital bed.

“Maria?” a groggy voice breaks her away from her thoughts and she looks up, smiling softly at her dad. Tears start to fall down his face and he grips her hand harder. “You’re okay, thank god, thank any higher being ever, you’re okay. What happened to you? What did they do?” He quickly became panicked and Maria gently tries to shush him.

“A few punches, got knocked off a ledge but it wasn’t enough to kill me. They left before they could do anything else to me. Then I went back to you and that’s all I can remember.”

“How far was the fall?”

“Three storeys”

“Jesus christ. I’m going to fucking-”

“You’re going to rest and you’re going to recover,” she cut in. “We’ll figure everything out after that.”

Tony agrees, he lets his eyes close and he falls into a light sleep. Recovery will be long and tiring and painful, but they’ve survived it so far.

Maria is sent home earlier than Tony. 

Her first few days at home are spent doing everything she can to start to destroy the rouge avengers in ways she knows will cut deep. It helps that she knows where they are, knows exactly what time she needed to do interviews and announcements so they can all watch it in real time. She knows exactly what she is doing when the security footage from the Siberian Hydra facility is “leaked”. She knows exactly what she is doing when she goes into public with her scars and bruises visible. The world will see what the rouge Avengers did to her and her father, and they will never forgive. 

Maria Stark knows people. She knows she is loved, some even adore her more than her father. She has held the title of America's darling ever since she was just an infant. She knows a majority of the people will react poorly when they see her laying half dead beside her father. 

The day the video is released, she watches on her laptop as the comments and responses flood in. Pepper sits beside her and they plan their next step. 

 

**One**

Tony has never liked hospitals. They’re too clean, too sterile and nice for somebody like him, somebody who gets motor oil and grease on pretty much everything he touches. Usually hospitals make his heart speed up and his throat tighten. Right now though, he isn’t too uncomfortable. 

Usually, it’s Maria sitting beside him on the uncomfortable hospital chair, typically with a disapproving look on her face. This time though, it's Tony in the chair, Maria is the one sitting on the bed. 

“She looks just like you did,” he speaks up, looking over at his daughter. 

“Really?” Maria asks softly, leaning over a bit so she can see both her father and the tiny yellow bundle in his arms. Tony moves some of the blanket away from the infant's face and smiles. 

“Yeah. Big brown eyes and the smallest hint of brown fluffy hair. Beautiful,” he answers. “I wonder if she’ll have freckles like you do and your mother did.”

“Maybe”

The two sit in a comfortable silence for a few moments, the calm finally returning after the stress that filled the hours previous. Maria gripped her husband's hand tightly and smiled, just watching the way her father softly hummed to her daughter. 

A soft knock comes from the door and they turn to look, seeing Pepper peeking into the room. “Hey, how’re you feeling?” She steps into the room when Maria waves her in and she moves to sit beside her. 

“I’m good, tired, but really good.” She rests her head on Peppers shoulder and Tony's heart melts a little at the sight of his wife and daughter. “Where’s Morgan?”

“With the boys. They insisted they watch her while I check up on you and their niece.” She glances over and smiles both at Tony and her granddaughter. 

“You can bring them in if you’d like? I think grandpa has gotten enough cuddle time, the uncles and aunt deserve some time to appreciate what I spent nine months making,” Maria decides, laughing softly at the quiet noise of disapproval Tony makes. 

“Alright, I’ll go get them.” 

A moment later, Peter Parker and Harley Keener walk into the room, Morgan Stark on Peters back. Maria smiles when she sees the way Peter's face lights up when he sees the yellow bundle. They all spend some time cooing at the baby and taking turns holding her, even little Morgan getting a turn to hold her on her lap. She stares at her with big eyes and a dropped jaw when Tony and Pepper confirm that yes, she was once that small too. 

The time comes for Peter and Harley to leave. They both kiss Maria and the baby on the forehead, both whispering their own promises to be the best uncle, before going their separate ways. Pepper falls asleep on a chair in the corner, Morgan curled up in her lap. Tony is still awake on the chair he’d been sitting on ever since he first got there. Maria sat with the baby in her arms, one hand holding her tiny fist. Her husband left to go get them something to eat, so the room was quiet. 

“You two decide on a name yet?” Tony asks softly, careful not to wake his sleeping wife and younger daughter. Maria smiles warmly and presses a kiss to her baby's forehead. 

“Luna Virginia Maria Stark”

“Stark?” Tony raises an eyebrow at that.

“Yeah, I thought it fit. You know what they say these days, Starks are from the stars,” she joked, recalling the headlines that ran after the whole ‘Infinity War’. “But also because it means determined, strong, and brave. I think that's who I want to raise her to be, that’s who you raised me to be.” She looked up and saw Tony smiling at her.

“Yeah I think you’ll do good at that. I’m proud of you kid, you’re gonna be a fantastic mom.” He stood and leaned forward, kissing Maria's forehead. “I'm so proud of you stellina.”

**Author's Note:**

> So that ending was sappy and a lot longer than I intended, but I really really loved this idea. I had my friend read it and she spent the entire time super stressed and worried about the one time for Maria, but then she thought it was cute. I hope you guys liked this! Again, I kept her love interest vague, so whoever she ended up with is up to you! I may write out some things, just seeing how it’d look for her to be with different people and stuff, I don’t know yet.
> 
> *Edits have been made because the Russo brothers really fucked up my image of who I thought Tony and Peppers kid was gonna be. Thanks guys lmao*  
> (Also if anybody is curious, 'stellina' means little star in Italian. My uncle calls me that a lot and I thought it'd be a cute little nickname for Tony to call Maria, idk.


End file.
